Alien Artifacts

by Seanan McGuire

  Laura broke off as someone else approached. Another courtesy guest, according to the hologram on his badge.

  He held up apologetic hands. “Please, take your time. Don’t let me disturb you.”

  “Join us, please.” Namrita invited him closer with a gesture when she saw his name. “Mr Mendlesohn.”

  “Please, call me Simon, and yes, I’m his son.” He smiled ruefully. “But no, I’m not a scientist. I’m a dentist.”

  “Do they have teeth, do you suppose?” Laura Tall Deer wondered mischievously.

  All three of them turned to look at the two closest aliens, of the eight that were currently wandering round the exhibits, all discreetly shadowed by heavy-set, square-shouldered men with very short hair and expensively tailored suits.

  “Are you a zoologist?” Namrita recalled reading somewhere that Henry Tall Deer had been something of that sort.

  Laura shook her head. “Astronomer. Grandad took me out to show me the stars from Kiruk Valley when I was six years old and told me all about the night when the Lander crashed. I’ve been trying to find out where it came from ever since.”

  She studied the aliens as they flanked a case containing a replica of the Hawking Probe. “He’d have been fascinated to see them walking around.”

  “Aren’t we all?” Simon Mendlesohn laughed a little nervously.

  Every biologist certainly was, if Namrita’s professional-cloud tag-stream was any indicator. The questions were endless and the misconceptions extrapolated from the First Scout’s corpse had turned out to be legion.

  That black pelt? Not fur. A living Traveller was enveloped by a sensory organ composed of hundreds of thousands of filaments. However they perceived the world around them—and Namrita really didn’t envy whoever had to find a way to ask politely for details about that—they responded with swirls and ripples of every possible color and shade coruscating from head to toe.

  So to speak, given they didn’t have either heads or toes. It turned out the Travellers used all four limbs for walking on or manipulating things with each one’s four digits with equal ease. They would also head straight in whatever direction they wanted to without feeling any need to turn around. Depending on what they were doing, their overall body shape could be rectangular, square or trapezoid.

  “Er, I think they’re coming this way.” Simon unconsciously retreated a pace.

  Laura stiffened. “I hope I didn’t offend them. Was I staring?”

  She had been, but there was no point in saying so. Namrita reminded herself that she was the oldest of the trio and the only one who’d actually met one of the Travellers before, when the ship’s navigator had visited Oxford ten days ago. Though that had been to discuss mathematics, not a trip for socializing or sightseeing.

  She took a step forward and summoned up a welcoming smile. She only hoped the Travellers stayed on all fours, or on two feet at least. Last week, when the navigator had stood up on a single limb in order to use all three others at once, it had towered over the tallest man in the gathering in a distinctly unnerving fashion.

  “Good evening.”

  “Good evening.” The first Traveller’s polite response came from the silvery translation box it carried in its—well, the biologists as well as the journalists were still arguing about what to call the fringe of what were now self-evidently not just passive locks of hair or fur. Each tendril was mobile, flexible, tactile, and Namrita had seen for herself how swiftly the navigator had worked out how to type with them on a human keyboard.

  She took refuge in conventional courtesy. “How are you enjoying the evening?”

  “It is very pleasing to meet so many of the humans who have devoted their time, effort, and skills to making contact with our people.” The first Traveller’s words were smooth, accentless and effortlessly fluent.

  Namrita could only imagine the chagrin among the linguists who’d painstakingly developed the protocols for learning an alien language, when it turned out the aliens themselves had perfected a translation device capable of handling every widely broadcast language.

  She didn’t imagine the diplomats were any too pleased either. All the ones she’d encountered had naturally assumed they would control access to and communication with the Travellers. It turned out these aliens had other ideas.

  The second one moved forward, waves of purple rippling towards Namrita. “We are most honored to meet you, Professor Kaur. May I take your hand?”

  “I—” Namrita steeled herself. “The honor is all mine.”

  They’re not tentacles. Not tentacles. Really not tentacles.

  As she extended her hand, the second Traveller’s tendrils enveloped it, colors shifting through the rainbow from scarlet at the tip to violet at the root. The firm caress wasn’t in the least unpleasant, silky and comfortably warm.

  “May I ask,” the alien enquired politely, “what inspired you to study the sphere in your youth?”

  “It was a puzzle.” What else could she say? “I’ve always liked a challenge.”

  Her reply prompted nearly identical flashes of silver across each Traveller’s pelt. She wondered what that meant.

  The first one had turned its attention to Simon Mendlesohn. “And you are the son of the man who made such a fortunate discovery when the sphere lacked energy. There is great honor among our kind for those who are lucky.”

  Perhaps it sensed his nervousness. It made no request to touch his hand before spiky waves of green indicated its focus shifting to Laura. “While your ancestor was the first human to see the First Scout after death?”

  “He was, yes.” Laura’s answer prompted those same flashes of silver from each Traveller.

  “Please—”

  Was it Namrita’s imagination or was there a note of urgency in the second alien’s modulated, artificial voice?

  “—did your ancestor ever say exactly where the sphere was found?”

  Laura nodded. “The First Scout had it—that’s to say, he was holding it. Or she, excuse me,” she added hastily.

  Questions of alien gender could wait as far as Namrita was concerned. She wanted to know why that answer prompted both Travellers to entwine a handful of tendrils and link with each other. Sparkling white surged from one to the other and back again.

  She wondered how unnerving the diplomats found the realization that these aliens could communicate in ways they had no hope of understanding.

  “That’s good news?” Simon Mendlesohn edged forward. “Why? What’s the thing for, anyway?”

  The Travellers loosed their hold on each other and the first one addressed him. “It is—”

  His translation box emitted an incomprehensible garble.

  Yellow swirled around the device each Traveller held.

  The second alien tried. “That is to say, it serves as—”

  Once again, the translator burbled nonsense. Yellow swirls darkened to orange.

  “Is there a problem, sir?” The Travellers’ dark suited escort stepped forward with a warning look at the three humans.

  Namrita wasn’t bothered. She guessed that glare was the security detail’s automatic reaction to anything unexpected. She was more curious about the translation device’s failure. When the navigator had visited Oxford, his box had been perfectly able to handle every variation on academic titles and all possible distinctions between various specialities in math and physics.

  “Forgive us,” the first Traveller said, and this time, Namrita was convinced she could hear irritation underpinning its words. “We seem to have discovered a lack in our translators’ priorities.”

  The second alien chose its words carefully. “The purpose of the music is to focus the mind on—”

  Gibberish defeated it again but now the first Traveller found a solution.

  “— to focus the mind upon the divine.”

  “The divine?” Namrita hadn’t expected that.

  “The divine.” The second alien’s closest tendrils twitched in her direction. “Is that
the correct word? You understand what we mean by that?”

  “Yes, at least, I think so.” She hastily qualified her answer.

  Each alien’s shifting pattern of colors instantly stilled.

  “Please,” the first Traveller invited, “tell us what humanity knows of the divine?”

  “Please,” the second echoed.

  Namrita looked at Simon Mendlesohn and Laura Tall Deer and saw the same question that now paralyzed her tongue was reflected in their eyes.

  Where on earth could they possibly start?

  SHAME THE DEVIL

  Sharon Lee & Steve Miller

  “You’re going too fast!” Brad yelled from the back seat.

  Seika sighed, and leaned into the controls. Brad was pissed off because he’d wanted to drive. Too bad he’d had the drone training, and she hadn’t, else he’d have had Seika Safka sitting on the back seat, bitching about his driving, and a Safka yielded to no one in the proper complaining of complaints.

  Still, Seika thought, the man had a point, given their present location on the search grid. Wouldn’t hurt to ease it back a little.

  “Why’re you slowing down?” Brad demanded. “Did you see something?”

  Bless the man, Seika thought, hand tightening on the throttle—then loosening again, because...

  She had seen something.

  Squinting behind her snow googles, she scanned the ice plain to her right. Something had—flashed. Maybe just a ray of sunlight, angled through a chunk of ice. Probably that, in fact, but she’d had an impression of…weight.

  And then she had it. An object, half hidden among the wind-carved ridges of snow, brilliant with more than sunlight, its angles weird, and its size—well, who could tell from such a distance? It flashed and flared in the sunlight, bleeding a spectrum that seemed just a little off.

  She kept the thing in her eye, and turned the sled toward it, taking them off-grid, but not by that much, and what else were they in Antarctica for, if it wasn’t to pick up weird stuff that had fallen out of sky?

  “What are you doing?” Brad demanded, but he sounded more curious than peeved.

  “Going to get a closer look at that—artifact,” she answered. “See it? Eleven o’clock.”

  “I don’t—oh.”

  She throttled the machine down again, approaching the artifact slowly, eyes sharp on the ice in case there were more of whatever-it-was, hidden in the wave-like ridges.

  “Stepping off,” Brad said. “Bringing the drone down.”

  She didn’t answer that; no need. That was how they were working the team: Seika Safka and her snowy blues machine, accompanied by Brad Billingsworth on drone.

  The machine shifted when Brad stepped off, and speeded up some in celebration of losing his bulk. The…thing, the artifact—was just ahead of her, deliberately flashing through the colors of the prism, like it was programmed, or—

  That was when the ice gave way beneath the machine so suddenly that Seika didn’t have time to yell.

  * * *

  “Safka!”

  Brad sounded worried, there in her ear. That was new and different. It occurred to her that he might’ve gotten into trouble, stepping off the sled, and she raised her head from the dash—

  “Ow!”

  Pain lanced through her ribs. Her vision went white—or no, maybe not. There was snow and ice all around her, not just under her skis and in the distance...

  It came back to her, then, the way the ice had just…crumbled away, and that quick she’d been falling. She’d stuck with it, though; rode the machine down and through it—the reflexes of a woman who’d learned about old-rimed ice, snow pits, and snow machines back before she’d gotten her first harmonica.

  “Always keep it under you! Just like ridin’ a bronco. Always keep it under you!”

  That’s what Uncle Charlie Fuentes’d told her; that was a story she could share with anybody.

  No, now. Uncle Charlie wasn’t here, was he? Just her, and Brad, and the machine, and the—whatever it was she’d been steering toward. Memory—or imagination—provided a glimpse of it, mid-fall, flashing from yellow to green...

  “Safka!”

  Brad still sounded worried. Ought to do something about that.

  Seika sat back in her seat and cautiously drew in an experimental deep breath—hurt some, but not as much as broken ribs would. She thought. Then, she took stock.

  All around her was ice. Ice so white it was blue. Snowy rubble surrounded the machine, one of the skis was twisted up over the bonnet, the runner swinging at a sad, unnatural angle. The other ski, and most of the bonnet, were buried under a fall of jagged ice.

  Looking up, she could see a small—very small—circle of more blue, which she very much hoped was the sky.

  No wonder Brad was worried, she thought. Bad form to lose one of ANSMET’s snow machines; worse form to lose your partner.

  Another breath, to calm herself, as she realize that this might be it, right here—buried in ice.

  “Safka,” Brad demanded, “where are you?”

  She heard something crack, overhead somewhere; felt an impact against her helmet hard enough to make her blink.

  “Answer, dammit! I can’t see anything down there...”

  Brad had gone from worried to pissed off, sounded like. Best to answer the man.

  “At least I made it to Bombay!”

  Seika’s voice filled the blue-hued ice chimney, which was not quite as silent as it ought to be otherwise. Portions of the collapse were still filtering downward with screes and ticks and musical clinks.

  As the echo of her voice faded, she became aware that it was more than her ribs that ached. She hurt in a dozen places, though if she was bleeding she didn’t know it. She was alive, and that was a start. She pulled her goggles off, shaking now, and feeling a little foolish at her declaration. Brad couldn’t help not having a sense of humor; she shouldn’t yank his chain.

  Something flashed, straight across from her, and half-hidden behind a chunk of ice as big as her snowmachine.

  Red. Orange. Yellow. Green...

  The artifact.

  So she had seen it, falling with her. Good, she thought, without really understanding why. That’s good.

  She’d been taking stock. Right, then.

  First thing, she hadn’t been killed outright, which she counted as a win. She wasn’t done yet, not by a long shot. After all, the ice hadn’t gulped her down whole; there was, far above her, that tiny blue hole to the sky.

  The snowmobile’s electric engine was still humming; the mandatory daytime lights were on yet, and the heated saddle was warm. The machine had landed horizontal, and she’d kept her seat, riding it down like she’d been taught long ago.

  Didn’t Uncle Bly have something to say about it, that time she hadn’t kept her seat. Learned a bushel of new words that time, during and after he’d pulled her out from the snow drift she’d managed to launch herself into. He’d been fueled pretty good that day, and he’d been behaving himself, sitting on the back pad of the machine he called Splendid Venda because he wasn’t fit to drive, so he’d been first off and into the drift, and the first to reach her. Dad had told her she couldn’t tell the story Uncle Bly’s way ‘til she could sing it, so she hadn’t, yet. She had a stanza started for him, somewhere, though.

  “Safka, listen to me.” That wasn’t Uncle Bly. No, wait—it was Brad. She was in Antarctica, halfway down a throat of ice, and her machine smashed up something bad.

  “Safka?”

  “Here.”

  “I need you to tell me where you are. Your condition, right?”

  “Right.”

  She looked around her.

  “I’m down, can see a little blue ‘way up, and the walls are blue. I’m kind of right on the edge of a cliff – maybe four feet from the edge, and I’m against a wall of crumbly snow or ice. The thing—the artifact—is on the other side of the split, maybe ten feet off.”

  “That big reflective ice chunk
? But you’re OK?”

  “Think so. Let me stand—oh!”

  She’d used the handlebars to push up onto her feet—and collapsed to the heated seat, cringing in pain. After a few gasps and shudders, she found her voice again.

  “I’m still on the sled,” she told Brad. “We’re pitched down a little—nose down, rear high. One ski broken, other ski buried. I can see bits of shred on the ice around me, but nothing big enough I can tell what it is. Was. Just now tried to put my weight on my right foot and it hurts like a summbitch.”

  “All right, don’t push it. I’ve called in. We’re waiting for—”

  His voice broke off clean.

  Seika brought her hand to the headset, tapped it.

  “Brad? Can you hear me?”

  There was no answer.

  * * *

  If she had her dates right, Dad and Uncle Charlie were singing somewhere in New Hampshire, or maybe it was Rutland, she forgot.

  If it’d been a normal fall, she’d’ve been on the road with them, touring the fairs and festivals. But it hadn’t been a normal fall, Aminah had finally got the lease on that place on Elm, and they’d been working together, day and night, scrubbing and painting, and getting equipment in.

  The shop had priority, said Aminah, who knew a thing or two about priorities. When that was ready, and open for business, then they’d paint and fix and move into the little apartment over-top. Seika’d said she’d help out in the noddle shop, but Aminah had laughed and said she wouldn’t be worth living with, if she didn’t travel around like she’d always done, playing music for a live audience.

  That’s when she’d gotten the call from ANSMET, and—with Aminah’s blessing—had headed out for Antarctica, the Transantarctic Mountains, and the Big Meteor Hunt.

  She’d been eight when the daytime bolide streaked past them before dropping into Lake Champlain, flinging down pebbles from heaven. She still had the first “piece from space” she’d found that day, on a chain around her neck. She’d retrieved it on the receding shore side, warm still. After that, she’d been fascinated by space and stories about space, like her mom had been, back then.